Tony Cesare
Head, Genome Integrity Unit

Dr Anthony (Tony) CesareBSc, PhD — is the Leader of the CMRI Genome Integrity Group. He obtained his BSc from Willamette University (Salem, Oregon, USA) and his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) before training as a USA National Science Foundation International Research Fellow with Roger Reddel at CMRI and a USA National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Fellow with Jan Karlseder at the Salk Institute (La Jolla, California, USA). He returned to Sydney in June 2013 to establish his own research group at CMRI with the assistance of a Cancer Institute NSW Future Research Leader Award.

Dr. Cesare’s research explores how molecular changes at the chromosome ends, or “telomeres”, during cellular ageing functions to prevent cancer and how these processes are affected during carcinogenesis. He discovered that during the ageing process molecular changes at telomeres result in a unique DNA damage response that causes protective growth arrest. This research also elucidated why pre-cancerous and cancerous cells are able to bypass this protective growth arrest, which can often result in genome instability and oncogenic transformation.

His group’s current efforts are focused on understanding the unique signaling mechanisms activated by telomeres when they lose their protective functions in aged or cancerous cells and using this as a model to understand cellular mechanisms that have evolved to protect the genome. He is also developing novel methods to visualize dynamic telomere functions during normal cellular growth and in cancer cells.